skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> I can see some poor campaign intern, years from now, slogging through all of my HN comments to find something to use against me while I run for local office. Poor kid.

Be smart: rotate your online accounts regularly. Do it on reddit, HN, any place where changing your identity is relatively cheap (FB unfortunately is not one).

Also unfortunately, pg doesn't allow deleting accounts on HN. Who knows why. So for HN, just stop posting on your current account, and start a new one, hoping pg wakes up and lets us delete our accounts in the future.
> If you really think liquidating GM and Chrysler's assets would have resulted in anything other than a net destruction of wealth for the U.S. I don't know what to tell you. What good is a car factory if the entire supply chain has broken down?

Why do you assume that the supply chain would have broken down?

> it's very hard to argue that they were a net loss on U.S. GDP unless you assume a "controlled bankrupcy" for GM and Chrysler would not have destroyed the U.S. (or global) auto industry. That's a big leap.

It's easy to assume that standard bankruptcy would not have destroyed the US auto industry because there's no reason why it would have destroyed the US auto industry.

Bankruptcy is basically about separating assets from liabilities.

If GM's assets are well-suited to profitably making cars, that's what they'd have been used for post-bankruptcy. Why do you assume otherwise?

US airlines go bankrupt every so often. Their creditors take a loss but the effect on the rest of us is that a few flights get cancelled and that's about it.
Avoid the Muni Metro.
Why Companies Built for the Good Times Don’t Last
If Craigslist doesn't own the posts, then that means the users own their own posts, and you don't have their permission to re-use their posts.

This just puts you back where you started.
Yes, I expect it is. As we get candidates who have 'grown up' in the Internet world, political spin doctors will take comments made in your teens and accuse you of holding the same opinions today. I imagine that the 'Internet Brand Management Consultant' will become a staple of folks who seek to hold public office.

Yes, its sad. Like the whole "I didn't inhale" rebuttal by President Clinton.
Responsive Web Design Testing Tool
> If the US GDP increases faster than population, then the per-capita income will always increase as well, even if the employment-population ratio plummets.

Yes, but irrelevant because GDP is not produced by non-workers, it's produced by workers.

GDP is #workers * output per worker. If the former decreases more than the latter increases, GDP goes down. Even if GDP goes up, GDP per capita can go down.

Suppose we start with 100% workers and then double the population while keeping the number of workers constant AND making them 25% more productive. The result is 25% more GDP but less GDP per person because there are twice as many people.

> Regarding state and local taxes in 2050, they are included in the $19 trillion figure.

In other words, they're part of the 19%. Which means that the current average rate is no where near 38%.

You're claiming that nearly doubling the average tax burden will have no effect. I'm pointing out that you're actually proposing something closer to 3.5x.

Even if we assume that you're correct, why do you think that Americans will pay those taxes? Note that your "the numbers work for the economy as a whole" argument is irrelevant to what an individual does.

The Clinton welfare reforms as well as current experience with unemployment benefits shows that legal employment is sensitive to fairly small amounts of money. How likely is it that it's insensitive to large amounts of money?

Yes, an interesting fraction of folks will go off book. They'll contribute to GDP but they won't be paying taxes. So, you'll need even higher rates on the "taxed GDP" which will push more folks off the book.

Yes, I realize that you're claiming that the remaining workers will have more after-tax than they have today but that's not how people think. High tax rates make evasion more profitable and generous payments to non-workers make not working more attractive.
cases = (
(3, 'Fizz'),
(5, 'Buzz'),
(7, 'Bazz'),
(11, 'Boo'),
(13, 'Blip'),
)

for i in range(1, 101):
out = []
for c in cases:
if i % c[0] == 0:
out.append(c[1])
if out:
print ''.join(out)
else:
print i

Edit: not to detract from the post's point, I think it's valid. Monoids are cool and all but simple counting arguments can take you a long, long, long, way when case analysis fails you.
Facebook opened up its ad inventory to third party companies with real-time bidding platforms a few months ago. Those companies can now help advertisers cookie web visitors and serve ads to those people on Facebook. Facebook is not selling this directly, only the vendors plugged into their "Facebook Exchange."

There's a bunch of enterprisey companies out punching eachother in the slide-deck to get big brands and the giant agencies using them for access to this.

We're the first company to roll out a fully functional solution with a free trial and consumer-quality UI.

Our product also does web retargeting across all the ad exchanges. We've been doing that for awhile when Facebook opened up and impressed us with the results we were seeing. So we doubled down and moved these features to the fore. Folks are digging it.
> The risk was already taken by the original lender, it was risk of default and was the reason for charging interest. ... So The risk assumed by debt collectors is less legitimate, and a collector's claim is on shakier legal basis

Not so fast.

The price that I'm willing to pay for something, the risk that I'm willing to take, depends on whether I'm able to sell my interest to someone else.

Curiously enough, other people aren't very willing to buy worthless things.

If debt collectors have "less legitimate" claims than the original lenders, they're not going to pay as much as they will if their claims have the same legitimacy. As a result, original lenders are going to demand more interest and protection for their interests.

If you want people to make risky loans, you must protect the rights of folks who buy loans that have fallen on hard times.
Waiting for the Snorg T-shirt "I'm a Democrat but I play for the Alliance!"
You mean East bay? Places like Berkeley? :-)
To be fair, I'm assuming it's not intended for us to be consuming individually at our discretion, but rather Ilya runs it on our behalf at an event. (Not like it would be hard to add some UI though!)

What really is bugging me though is the antialiasing, is anybody else seeing that?
Haha. Got a call like this at work one day and did the same thing for a few minutes ("Hmmm, 'Start Menu'? I'm having trouble finding it..."). Before it was all over, all my coworkers in the area had turned their chairs and were just watching and listening. A collective "WTF?" was let out when I got off the phone.
Marketplace to sell ownership of our software?
I, with a partner, developed a Windows application that we would like to sell to a new owner. It's an application for the entertainment industry, and the third partner with all the contacts industry experience has in short not realized his contribution. There is no revenue, just a few hundred hours of development time to save the new owner on a similar project. Is there a marketplace like Flippa for software like this? Or, is there another common way to handle this?
Yes, for now, it's one site per account. We're working on multi-site support very soon! If you make multiple accounts we can aggregate them all under the login of your choosing after an e-mail to support@perfectaudience.com
This. Many rails apps spend much of their time rendering views, and even a decent caching strategy on the server can increase performance tons.
'yeah, i can understand that, and i don't think it's so odd - you want to see it and, sometimes, know the artist too. but that doesn't exclude online marketplaces as long as they are local (i didn't explain completely, but the site i used as an example has artists local to me).'

I'm very glad you said this. It's exactly what we're going for at Artsicle.com. Supporting your local artists by renting their artwork. If you like it, buy it. I'm sorry to say, we're not shipping outside the U.S. right now ;)
I'm not sure even hell will take you after doing what you just did. There is no metaphysical consequence great enough save to have experienced the writing of that.
I wasn't aware that Sean Parker was a noted expert on privacy and the implications thereof.
Any thoughts on how startup Chile compares to traditional Silicon Valley incubators? Obviously, they don't take equity and have a focus on contributing to the entrepreneurial community.

A good friend of mine just flew down to Santiago for Startup Chile. He's definitely enjoying it, but before he left he was concerned that getting out of the US entrepreneurship scene might make it harder to reach US consumers and get relationships with investors. On the flipside, S.C. seems focused on creating an international community of entrepreneurs - I'm told there's teams from 33 countries.

It'll be interesting to see how many of these teams will end up in YC.
Misusing DOM text methods
I'm well aware - that's where I was raised! :)
the complete rewrite might killed Netscape, but it saved Mozilla and Firefox.

What do you mean?
This applies to business in general. If you're idea can be trivially reproduced by a semi-competent competitor, then you will find yourself in a heap of trouble once you have any measure of success.
It doesn't count as a rewrite when the rewrite is in a language that's cooler than the original version.
Louis C.K. And The Rise Of The 'Laptop Loners'
Best chair advertisement I've ever seen.
I think outing someone for playing one of the most popular online game out there is ridiculous. What you do in game doesn't impact what you do in real life, and killing a sheep in Elwyn Forest doesn't mean you like to kill animals. However, I did look at the site and some of the comments she wrote go further than the game itself. She posted that she "wished she wasn't at work and could play instead" and that she was "slacking off" at work. I see nothing wrong with bringing those comments to potential voters.
I would feel bad for the PadMapper maintainer, except for the fact that he seemed so self-entitled here in the threads.
My main issue with the described github-flow is that they push development branches to the server, and encourage that to be done very often.

And my issue with that is once you push something, it's off-limits to any kind of archaeology in the history. And that's not a "principle" thing. If you push your branch, do some rebasing and push again, you are in a world of hurt.

The operation will very likely fail, and recovery is a serious pain in the butt.

If you don't ever do any sort of archaeology, then that's great and it will work for you. I have had numerous occasions where I've tried some git merge or something and screwed things up. I've fixed it by putting my Indiana Jones hat on and digging in.

Being able to tamper with the history has gotten me out of trouble many times. The only time it has gotten me in to trouble is rewriting history that has been published.
Although that might suggest independent scammers.
It would seem inefficient to cold call the same person again if the first was unsuccessful. Although it is possible they just take random numbers from a big list and don't update it until the end of the day.

If they are indeed operated from actual call centres I would be curious to know how agents are recruited. I wonder if people actually apply for call centre jobs and are told they will be working for "Windows support" in other words, maybe some of them don't even know that they are scamming people.
I think Ruby has some pretty nice documentation. at ruby-doc.org I love being able to toggle source view for functions and stuff to see how its implemented. I know this is probably violating some "best practice" of don't show implementation, but honestly, seeing an implementation makes it a lot easier to understand what a function does than just having your params and their types listed out...
> killing a sheep in Elwyn Forest doesn't mean you like to kill animals

What GOP member would speak against hunting?
That would be true if App.net pays out $20,000 a month to developers, for forever. App.net promises to pay $20,000 to developers, but is that a fixed cost? If it is a fixed cost, then you are right, the more people who sign up, the lower the subscription price can be. A million users could fund $20,000 a month very easily. But is $20,000 a month fair to the developers? By the time App.net has a million users, we can assume there will be a lot of apps competing for a slice of that $20,000. What happens when there are 1,000 apps in the eco-system. Do they all get $20 a month? If yes, then hasn't App.net failed at its primary stated mission, of helping fund app development?

If App.net is to remain true to its mission, then that $20,000 should go up over time. And if it goes up over time, it is no longer so clear that subscription levels can remain as low as they are now.

We should ask how much money App.net is making. Similar services are upfront about what percentage they take from the subscriber's money. App.net needs to offer at least that level of transparency.
> Romney said in the same spiel that the free market always works better.

And he's right because the free market has far more diversity. To put it another way, govt is pretty much the definition of systemic risk.

The free market has folks doing lots of different things. Some think that electric cars are the way to go while others stick with gas. Still others go with compressed air.

Govts don't make diverse bets and they're a lot slower to change course when things don't work (because the folks benefiting from the current plan aren't paying its costs).

Yes, "all the wood behind one arrow" can be more efficient, but only when everything works out, which is not all that often.

"Let 1000 flowers bloom" works much better in the real world.
Zynga plummets 19% after cutting 2012 outlook
Sure. If you were partisan, you would feel that way. If you had political leanings the other way, the word Democrat would evoke the same feelings. shrugs
We don't need to know exactly how much CO2 will warm the atmosphere. We have a probability distribution. We can't quantify the economic damage of climate change precisely, but we know enough to know it won't be $0, which is what the "wait and see" point of view prices the cost as.

Also, climate change isn't even the big issue here. I'm talking about much more mundane and also much more damaging air and water pollution from factories, cars, etc. We have very solid empirical evidence about that. Did you know that after the EPA's ban on leaded gasoline, blood lead levels in children dropped by a factor of 3-5x in just one decade? See: http://www.epa.gov/ace/body_burdens/b1-graph.html. This corresponds to a multiple IQ-point impact from lead. What's the dollar value of a multiple IQ-point impact on the nation's children (and future workforce)? It's a huge number.

Did you know that a recent Harvard Medical School study concluded that the true price of coal power factoring in the externalized environmental costs is 2-3x as much as the market price? http://www.boston.com/lifestyle/green/greenblog/2011/02/new_.... The same study found the total externalized costs of coal power to be $200-$500 billion/year: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1749-6632.2010..... Here in Chicago we recently shut down two coal-fired power plants that were causing $100 million in health damage per year and only creating 50-60 jobs each.

The total cost of environmental damage being down every year, in terms of quantifiable impact to people is probably into the trillion dollar per year range. People tend to think of environmentalism as being about "soft values" but that couldn't be further from the truth. Even if we assign zero value to the environment itself, we can't avoid putting a dollar figure on the value of the services the environment provides us. When New York manages to avoid building a $6-$8 billion filtration facility by properly managing the Catskills watershed, we can't avoid the inescapable economic conclusion that damage to the Catskills and similar watersheds needs to be valued in the billions of dollars range. We can't avoid the conclusion that when a company dumps waste into those watersheds, it's an economic injury no different than if tore up city streets or caused a bridge to collapse.

It's the government's job to protect us from all this, the same as it's the government's job to protect us from people who steal your car or break into our houses. It goes to the heart of why government exists.
Finally an article that tells it like it is. A word to the commenters trying to disparage the author. I am sure wherever you live, in la la land, you wake up smiling, sipping your coffee, checking tech blogs, dev sites, spending couple of hours learning a new technology and then when you feel like it you write a single PHP page and call it a day. But let me tell you how the rest of us do it. You wake up with a headache because you spent last night dreaming about all the meetings you had the day before. You chug your coffee hoping the headache will go. You spend 15 minutes catching up on emails and if you are lucky 15 on reading tech blogs and then the misery begins. In 15 minutes increments you jump from coding project 1 to a meeting to fixing project 2 to a meeting to learning about the domain of project 3 ... And then some douchebag in a meeting says why don't we use technology X and spend many days learning about it to build something we could've coded in couple of hours. And then management says why don't we use technology Y because all the douchebags on the internet are talking about it. You try to make you case that we don't need any of that i.e. we don't need to use Hibernate for COUPLE of select/update/delete queries SQL is not that evil! and then even though most of the team agrees with you, no one has the guts to say it out loud. You return to you desk trying to remember the algorithm you were designing in your head but part of it is gone. You jump from JAVA to .NET to PHP to javascript to C++ to SQL to Hibernate to jquery to YUI to MVC to mapper to, to, to ... You go back home, do whatever nightly routine you do and call it a day.
Sorry, passion is not the problem here. Software developer is a tough job and I know I can't do it when I am 50.
For the last year, I've been thinking about what my longtime involvement in certain very popular gaming sites would mean for me if I ever chose to run for office in the future. (It's pretty easy to connect me to the account) There's a somewhat reasonable chance that I may try my hand at public service 20 or 30 years from now.

This article basically proves the worst of my fears, and makes me wonder if I should try to divorce my "real life" identity with online gaming identities going forward. :(
Stress-Strain Curves In Web Engineering
A small minority of Americans have extremely conservative religious views, and firmly believe that everything in our world is a battle between the forces of God (which they are on the side of) and people controlled by various demons on the side of the Devil (which they are opposed to). Members of this minority tend to view everything through this lens. If you come from this perspective, it is clear that a game where people pretend to be evil beings killing people HAS to be inspired by forces of evil. And people who play those games are in danger of their souls being captured by those evil beings.

The same minority applying the same logic come to other conclusions that surprise the more secular majority - such as that Harry Potter is the work of the devil and should be banned. (Again, if there are only 2 sides that control everything, the world described in Harry Potter clearly is not inspired by the Bible and must be the work of the Devil.)

This minority is strongly attracted to the Republican party, and has proven influential within it. (Both Rick Perry and Michelle Bachmann publicly identify with this minority.) However their views do NOT reflect the majority of the Republican party.

I can completely understand how some members of the Republican party who have this world view would conclude that this "outing" is a good idea. That said, it is no more fair to attribute these opinions to Republicans in general than it is to attribute, say, Shirley Maclaine's views on reincarnation to all Democrats.
> So they're as bad as each other then? :(

Even if they're equally bad in total, they're bad in different ways and that can matter.
Use Jekyll To Keep Your Blog From Folding Under Traffic
Judging from their pixel they buy on FBX through AppNexus and are probably buying through their API so overall their features are limited to what AppNexus is offering them and their cost structure probably includes the additional CPM cost of using someone else's technology to buy on FBX.
about HTML5 on mobile :
+ the problem is at the source. bad language and api design choices make HTML5 what it is now. You cant build great software with bad technologies. Is it here to stay ? yes , Is is over-rated? of course. You want a great UX? then go native.
obj-c is not that hard, and java is easy to learn. why anybody would want to do some javascript instead is a mistery.
> Did you look? Profiles of people are active.

Yes, and if the listed people were real, the site would be offline in a matter of days. Who is going to stand for being misidentified as a child molester online?

Unless, of course, the people listed really are molesters/predators/whatever, in which case they're already listed on the official sites.

Either way, this site is some kind of scam -- we agree on that.
IMO = in my opinion

How did you get your numbers for your conclusion about "most perspectives"? That is not just an opinion, correct? Otherwise you might have used words like "I think" or "in my opinion".

Another related conclusion I'm curious about is "their data" (i.e. the data users uploaded is now CL's data). That is not just an opinion, correct? When I search for a clear answer on that issue, I can't find one. I'd love to see some clear guidance on this question.

Platform providers do sometimes use their advantages unfairly. But platforms cannot succeed without some level of symbiosis between those who provide them and those who use them. This is only my opinion. However I have seen others say much the same thing.
I think it would be even better for schools if we could get an OLPC (or some device that runs sugar linux) with touchscreen.
EJ...is that you? What a coincidence. What's up, old office-mate?
And now on Forbes:
http://www.forbes.com/sites/susanadams/2012/10/04/a-big-ques...
>>> "Some of us aren’t ready to give up on HTML5 yet."

Who was "giving up" on HTML5 just because some founder of some company said so to begin with? I appreciate that Mark's HTMl5 app was less efficient than his native app. Sucks for him and his team, I guess. My question is: So what? These are just tools. Pick one that is appropriate for your company, given the entire context of the product you are attempting to deliver, and make a practical and well thought out decision. For so very many, HTML5 is the right choice. For many others, it's not.

Soo... Sorry, I get bored with hyperbolic, "The Rise of..." and, "The Death of ..." articles.
Anyone else remember having to hand-calibrate 2d printers?
What's truly sad here is that American politics has stooped this low. It's practically treated like a football game rather than a serious discussion on issues.
the website linked in the article is mainly made up of dailykos comments. how are they not fair game? The WoW stuff is a little ridiculous (and I would bet ineffective) but postings on a political site definitely matter.
You didn't like the site, but you obviously felt it was worth sharing. Perhaps "people who engaged with this content" would be better than "like", but it'd make for a much bigger button.